The present invention relates generally to a document management system, and more specifically to providing remote storage and retrieval facilities for archiving electronic documents.
Traditionally, document management required that vast amounts of documents be shipped to storage facilities only to necessitate retrieval when needed. The result was an inordinate and unnecessary expense of both time and money. Recently, however, the cost of storing an image of a sheet of paper on digital media has become less than the cost of printing and storing the sheet of paper itself. This development is the result of the rapid development of storage system technology. Digital document storage systems, in addition, facilitate later electronic search and retrieval.
Managing conventional digital document storage systems may present several problems. Conventional document storage systems require that a user manually scan every document on a digital scanner in order to create an image of a document that may be archived in digital storage. Consequently, in order to archive a document, a scanner must be available to the potential user. Notwithstanding the availability of a scanner, a user must remember that a document needs to be scanned in order to create an archive. In addition, the scanning process may be time consuming if it is necessary to scan thousands of document pages.
Conventional storage systems may also have a problem with the amount of available capacity. Considering that no storage medium has an infinite capacity, additional storage may be necessary to store all of the information that an individual wishes to store. For some user applications, where space is limited, it would eventually become impracticable to continuously add storage mediums for archiving digital documents. Furthermore, if the primary storage mediums are damaged, valuable archived information may be lost.
The present invention provides a practical and efficient method for extending the storage capacity in a computer system to facilitate archiving documents.
A document image storage system includes a control mechanism that automatically archives a document image in response to a document being produced by a peripheral device. The document image storage system also includes a memory machine and a remote storage facility coupled to the memory machine. The first memory machine archives document images. The remote storage facility archives document images received from the first memory machine. According to one embodiment, the memory machine and the remote storage facility are coupled via a communications channel. The communications channel transmits document images between the memory machine and the remote storage facility.